


Not the Person in the Poem

by Hecate



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Consent Issues, Drug Use, F/F, Loss of Control, loss of self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-08
Updated: 2016-11-08
Packaged: 2018-08-23 21:03:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: This is how they will love: in pieces, and most of them are not their own.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tveckling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tveckling/gifts).



Titus tells her that they can bring her back, can bring Lexa back; and Clarke says yes even though she doesn't believe him, says yes because no other answer is possible.

It's Lexa, and Clarke isn't done loving her.

She drinks out of the cup Titus gives her in front of Lexa's bed, and the liquid tastes bitter, it tastes as if something inside of her goes away and returns darker and wilder and with a voice of its own. It tells her to go on, it tells her to hunt, and it sounds gleeful and breathless. It sounds like it’s tried to break free for too long. 

And it breaks right through her.

He tells her what to do and she wants to deny him, wants to leave, but Lexa lies on the bed unmoving, bloody and gone, and she can't accept that, she can't, not when she can fix it, not when it's not the end. Not when this new thing inside of her starts to grin, reaching out for Lexa's body, and she can't rein it in.

“Blood,” he tells her, “a body,” he goes on, “a life unlived and a life beloved.”

So she gives Titus her blood, she bleeds for him until her legs are shaking and her vision goes grey and she swears she can hear Lexa talking to her, until she hears words of love and warning. 

She lets him keep Lexa's body, Lexa's skin cold and unreal as she kisses her one more time. It feels wrong to leave her behind. But Lexa is not breathing, and Titus’ instructions are a litany of horrors that need to be done. So she writes her goodbye into Lexa's skin and she gets up from her knees.

“See you soon,” she whispers as she turns her back on Lexa, walking away with her every step painting the ground with Lexa's blood. 

“See you soon,” she tells Murphy, and he nods and doesn't quite look at her. She thinks he might not believe her, and she almost tells him that she would never leave Lexa behind.

She kills a Grounder child with Lexa's knife, letting it bleed into the ground. She wants to hold its hand as it dies, wants to say “Sorry” and take away all the pain with a swift strike. But she doesn't, and she watches it die slowly, and she is not quite herself.

Its blood is slippery beneath her fingers as she paints her threats to the unliving, tells them to let go of the girl she loves even after death did them part. She thinks she hears them laughing. 

But the thing Titus gave to her, that unflinching and unforgiving thing, laughs right back, and the sound has teeth in it. Silence follows.

“One more,” she tells the body, the moonlight drowning in all the red spreading around it. And she stands up once more, and she leaves to find her way home.

'One more,' the thing inside her whispers, and it sounds sad to be done so soon.

Bellamy looks almost happy when he sees her.

“What happened?” she asks him, and she sounds like herself, she sounds as if Lexa wasn't dead, and her mind and body were her own, were not in pieces and some of them didn't belong to her. But when he speaks, she doesn't listen; and when they're alone, Lexa's knife slips between his ribs like a dream.

He dies with her name on his lips, he dies and she remembers almost loving him. 

She thinks, for a few seconds, that she might have killed for him given the chance. But Lexa died before him, and Lexa died in her arms. And the voice inside of her does not care for Bellamy Blake.

She knows, suddenly, that something inside of her shattered into dust and nothingness when she drank the liquid Titus gave her, something went away and she knows it won't return. It's okay. There is more space inside of her now. 

She leaves without anyone seeing her, she leaves and she hears that new voice singing with joy. Once she would have thought the sound horrible. But now she likes the way it echoes.

When she returns to Polis, Lexa is waiting for her.

“You did well,” Titus tells her, and he seems to be proud of her, he seems to be proud of something else as well. Himself, maybe.

Murphy lies on the ground, white and blank as the paper she always yearned for on the Ark and on the Ground, and she steps over him easily.

“I did,” she replies, and it's not her who speaks, not her who reaches out for Lexa and finds her skin warm and her smile sharp beneath her lips.

It's not Lexa who kisses her back, not quite Lexa. It's pieces of her, all of them in the wrong order, all of them jagged and brittle and close to falling apart. And there's something showing through the cracks between, something that stretches and grows, that's dark and wild and gleeful and awfully familiar.

“You came,” it says.

The mouth that used to be Clarke's lifts for a smile. “Of course,” it replies, echoes of Clarke in its words. “I would never leave you behind.”


End file.
